I once saw bows like that for sale somewhere, maybe Krakow Company, who used to advertise in TBM. They sold bows from around the world, including bows from Africa and Asia. I just did a quick search on it and came up empty. The bows would soon become useless after leaving the rain forest, however, as they are designed for and are made of woods that depend upon the high humidity to retain their flexibility. I have a close friend who was born in Venezuela, and he said he had a bow that was made by the natives there. It was solid black and heavy, he said.
I took a college course, gosh, it must have been 27 years ago, on the history of the Native Americans. The course ended up on the (then) most current, ongoing process of divesting native peoples of their lands and culture. In Brazil, logging and gold (sound familiar?) has been the draw, and missionaries and loggers and miners and the clapboard towns that cater to them and their vices have made great inroads, affecting indigenous peoples along the length of the Amazon. Shorts and sneakers, money and alcohol part them from their history and each other, until they become low-cost labor to feed the economic machine. Languages and cultures are forever forgotten, along with the intimate knowledge of their lands and the creatures on it.
The most devastating tool in the removal of people from the path of progress is not the chain saw and the bulldozer, though. It is the myriad of diseases which we carry, that the natives have no resistance to. Common colds, venereal diseases and other easily transmitted pathogens, they are doing to the Yanomamo what they did to the Narragansett and the Inuit. People who have never seen a motorboat or a white man are ravaged by diseases they cannot fight. Brazil created the Xingu Reserve as a place for many tribes to live. But the land, and the peoples, are changed.
Some day we are going to run out of unexplored, unsettled territory. What will we do then? Cram ourselves cheek to jowl into smaller and smaller quarters, do with less and less food, water, personal space, sanity? Or could we somehow decide that "this" is enough people on the planet, and live relatively uncluttered lives, limiting our demands upon the earth, its resources and the beauty that we have inherited from our ancestors, and will pass on to our children?
But no, our egos, and national pride, and power (there are more of us than there are of you!) and the economy (is the economy a Ponzi scheme or what??) demand more and more people. The whole thing is a conundrum, a Gordian knot that we can't easily find the solution to. So, as humans, we do what we do best. Don't worry about a problem until we have to! So we flirt, and make babies, and let it all take care of itself. Remember the ZPG movement (Zero Population Growth) that those whackos in the seventies were talking about? And see how well we have worked on the energy thing? Alternative energy, Independence from foreign oil, this was all the rage when I was in high school. That was (sigh) thirty-five years ago.
We are humans. We are stupid.
So, we now know that there are some free humans out there. They do not contribute to the labor force, they do not pay taxes, they do not vote nor pay a tithe to the Church nor support the Powers That Be in any way, shape or form.
God help them.
Killdeer
Topic: Tribe from Peru (Read 642 times)
